An Ark for the Listener

One of experimental music's current stars, Jeck expertly mixes, loops, and layers passages from old records into an instantly identifiable aesthetic.

It's been interesting to hear new records this year from a number of turn-of-the-millennium experimentally minded artists: The past couple of months have brought releases from Oval, Fennesz (working with guitarist David Daniell and drummer Tony Buck), and now the turntable collagist Philip Jeck. Music from this sphere tends to move pretty fast, but in the case of these three, they've mostly stuck with variations on their distinctive, well-honed sound. For Jeck, that sound is built from old vinyl. His training is as a visual artist, and his primary medium is his live show that sometimes touches on installation art. Using a few turntables, a keyboard, and pedals, Jeck expertly mixes, loops, and layers passages from old records and molds them into an instantly identifiable aesthetic. At his best, he makes some of the most moving and replayable experimental music around.

There are ideas running through Jeck's music that have been at the forefront of conversations in the last couple of years. He digs up cultural artifacts from the past (in his case, vinyl) and recontextualizes them, so his music touches on nostalgia and memory and the passage of time, and it invites you to meditate on the way that cultural information disappears and reappears and what that might mean. But where younger artists are applying these ideas to the music of their childhood and turning over signifiers of the 1980s and 90s, Jeck takes a longer view. He's almost 60 years old, and for him, the entire history of recorded sound is fair game. Couple this with his high-art background, where he's much more likely to play an auditorium or art gallery than a club, and it makes sense that Jeck's music has a symphonic character. His records feel more like classical music, and, unlike so much turntable-based music since the rise of hip-hop in the late 1970s, they have no overt connection to pop. Jeck's music seems designed for a big room where people want a certain kind of overpowering experience, and he knows how to deliver for this audience.

An Ark for the Listener is Jeck's first widely available solo album since 2008's Sand (he had a vinyl-only live album in between, along with a couple of other small-scale releases). Where Sand was built around a central idea-- it was a concept album that riffed on the notion of the "fanfare"-- and had a unified sound, An Ark for the Listener is held together more loosely. The music here was developed in live performance and was based around a stanza from an epic Gerard Manley Hopkins poem about a maritime disaster, "The Wreck of the Deutschland", but there aren't obvious connections between that source and the music at hand. Ark comes over more like a survey of some of the things Jeck does best.

I will say that the Hopkins poem that inspired the project explores death, and Ark is an especially dark LP that is particularly heavy on drone, as Jeck loops and layers dissonant passages of strings into tense and uneasy held tones. "The All of Water" is especially stirring in this vein, with a richness in texture reminiscent of the spiky drones of Tim Hecker, even though the sources here sound like old classical recordings. The following "The Pilot (Among Our Shoals)", which builds on that template and adds a drum roll and indistinct screeching tones that echo and flange wildly, is the sort of track that virtually no one else could have pulled off. It feels like a scratchy black and white film with bits of music from all over fluttering into the frame, and somehow manages to reach back 100 years while sounding utterly contemporary. And then "Ark" finds Jeck experimenting with a greater amount of space, as he opens with a long passage of creepy bell tones that sound like a ghostly music box from another realm. Each track here has its own character and establishes its own context, and Jeck's finely-tuned ear manages to bind them together. And if An Ark for the Listener may not be the best place to start for the curious (Stoke or 7, both of which add more lyricism to the mix, are better in that regard), it finds him working at a characteristically high level, which is very welcome indeed.